References in the age of 140 characters, plus interviews with Peeesseye & Talibam!, Frank Fairfield, and Darkthrone.

I first heard Frank Fairfield in the Manhattan office of his record label, Tompkins Square Records, on a trip I took to New York in October 2008 to see a heavy metal band. It was a YouTube video that had been recorded about a month earlier. Fairfield played "Rose Connelly", an old murder ballad in which the title character is poisoned and stabbed by her lover. He sat with a straight, stiff back, his body pushed forward in a wooden slat back chair, sawing his fiddle with eyes closed, his motion both perfectly fluid and somehow pained. I was transfixed. I left with a little 7" record of two Fairfield cuts. Josh Rosenthal, who runs the label, promised more were on the way.

I didn't tell Fairfield this the few times we spoke on the phone 18 months later: The young old-time fiddler, banjo player, guitar picker, and-- above all-- singer despises New York, which he seems to see as an asphalt-overwhelmed corporate jungle. Oh, he loathes the record industry, too, though he seems to like Rosenthal just fine. His interest in rock'n'roll seems, at best, distant. And 7"s? 78s, please.

Fairfield, 24 and living with his wife, Jackie, in Los Angeles, is one of America's best conduits of antiquity. Four years ago, at the Hollywood Farmer's Market, Fairfield-- playing for change and dollar bills-- mesmerized Matt Popieluch, the guitarist in Foreign Born and Fool's Gold. Popieluch helped Fairfield get a show and, eventually, a tour with the Fleet Foxes during their popular ascent in the fall of 2008. Now his manager, Popieluch brought Fairfield to Tompkins Square.

On his eponymous debut for the label, released last year, Fairfield splashes out a playful banjo line as he sings the weary, traveling-family blues of "Cumberland Gap". On "The Train That Took My Girl From Town", his destitute voice makes the microphone crackle, his fingers sliding and snapping against the strings. "Oh, it's gone, solid gone," he mutters. And his closing take on "Old Paint", a song that some estimate to be at least 150 years old, he howls over a lonesome, ragged violin line, incidental drones pushing beneath a melody that sags low, like a frown. Fairfield hates this version. It's too much like Jess Morris' definitive take, he insists. When I hear it, though, I stop doing anything else.

Sure, these are songs that you can hear elsewhere, and some of the versions replicate those of the masters. But Fairfield's style inspires trances. And his ideas and experiences, we're guessing, might cause a little deserved consternation.

Pitchfork: You're in Los Angeles right now, correct? Where are you living in L.A.?

Frank Fairfield: I'm home. I've lived in Glendale. I haven't sat still for very long just about anywhere, but since I've been back in Los Angeles, I've lived in Glendale for a little while and Frogtown and all kinds of weird little neighborhoods. Now I'm in Highland Park.

Pitchfork: Which neighborhood is your favorite?

FF: Oh, I like it here a lot. It's kind of an older neighborhood, and it's a bunch of families and a lot of Salvadorans. There's no loud parties and crazy stuff. It's just a real calm, kind little family neighborhood right on the edge of Mount Washington here. It's nice.

Pitchfork: Where were you born?

FF: Well, I kind of grew up all over the place, but I was born in the central valley of California. My family just kind of-- I don't think they ever really sat still since my grandfather had been moving and moving and moving. My father just continued that. I moved all over the place, and now I'm back here in California.

Pitchfork: Location can have a great impact on how one learns music. Where were you when you first started playing?

FF: I've been playing one way or another since I was about three years old. I don't remember not knowing how to play any instruments. But I took it took over a little more seriously starting back here in Los Angeles, when I was pretty frustrated, not doing too well. And I just started playing music on the street and walking around with a fiddle, and I think that's kind of when I started being serious-- or as serious as it's going to get. [laughs]

Pitchfork: Were you frustrated with people you'd played with or by trying to make music?

FF: No, no, nothing like that. I didn't have any intention of playing music for a living or anything like that. I was just not doing well in my head or whatever you call it and drinking too much. I was kind of pathetic. That's what got me playing out in the street. I ran out of money and needed more gin for the night. Threw out a hat to see if I could make enough to get another bottle. And eventually it became a lot happier of a thing, and now I really enjoy playing music. I feel like it's something to try to give to people. For a while, it was something to try to push at people, playing old murder ballads and being upset about everything I was seeing around me. But now I feel a lot more at peace with it.

Pitchfork: Murder ballads and lonesome songs seem like unusual fodder for a street performer. You catch more flies with honey, after all.

FF: [laughs] Yeah, that is kind of unusual. I don't know: I think people like feeling miserable just as much as they like feeling happy. It doesn't really make any difference. I was working odd jobs and little things like that, and eventually I saw that I could make a more peaceful and honest living playing music on the street. I started doing that. It felt pretty good.

Pitchfork: Do you recall an experience with a song that was a tipping point, a song that first let you know you were very interested in music?

FF: I don't know if I do. I was born or raised in the church, so I guess the first songs I would have played would have been church songs.

Pitchfork: What sort of church did you attend?

FF: It was the Mennonites.

Pitchfork: That's certainly a peculiar denomination-- it can be mighty old-fashioned.

FF: Yeah! I don't associate much with anybody. I'm not big on all the teachings and groups and being a part of something, I guess. It's not really that much of a family thing, either. My grandfather is the guy who had a big conversion, and my father just kind of followed suit. But it's not something that has some long roots in the family, so it's kind of a funny thing. I don't prescribe to that kind of thing.

Pitchfork: When's the last time you attended a Mennonite church?

FF: Maybe around the teenage years or so, when I just wanted to run away from home.

Pitchfork: You ran away from home?

FF: Well, I don't know if I ran away from home, but it wasn't like an overnight, under-the-shadows-of-darkness kind of thing. It was more of I quit high school and decided I wanted to go move around a little bit and figure some things out. I feel like I'm still on that trip. I don't think that trip's ended-- just seeing some real world and seeing some really rough parts of the country and some rough characters. Working in factories and things like that, it just puts a little hair on your chest. I think that's what I was looking for, to get a little hair on my chest.

Pitchfork: What sort of jobs did you find?

FF: I lived by a bay for a while, and I shucked oysters. Some packing things. You know, just whatever odd job you can find whenever you're moving around. I never really cared much for the franchise kind of work, so I'd try to find things that I considered to be a little more honorable.

Pitchfork: You've said that you had planned to put some of your own songs on your debut, but your manager, Matt Popieluch, and Tompkins Square owner Josh Rosenthal convinced you otherwise. What did they want to see in the debut?

FF: Well, it's sort of like that. I had a few things that I kind of pieced together that I was thinking of throwing in there, but I guess Matt just recommended to do the ones that I had already been singing out a lot or the ones that certain people maybe connected to or the ones that he liked and he wanted to hear on there. I guess I wanted to hear what other people had to say about it because I'd never made a record. I wouldn't know what to do on something like that. I'm not going to sit and listen to it, so if anybody else has any input for it, they probably have a better idea than I do. But the next time we go in and record things, I'd like to do a few-- mostly, if not all of it-- things that I've pieced together.

Pitchfork: I've never had the opportunity to see you live, so I've never seen you perform these other songs. What can you tell me about them?

FF: They're just like any of the other songs, I hope. It's just how all of these songs get put together, at least that's the way I feel. Listen to the blues songs. Any blues song you hear has at least two or three stock verses in it and just some phrase that's been floating around or some kind of play on words. None of this stuff got made up at any time. The real songs are the ones that float around-- verses get swapped here and there, and someone added a little piece of this that he heard from somewhere else that his grandmother told him, and he puts it in there. That's what songs are, I think.

I feel like there's a lot of pressure now. I don't know if it's pressure or what it is, but there's this idea that musicians have to be songwriters, too. I never understood that. That never made much sense to me. I feel like there used to be songwriters and there were poets and there were musicians, and those things didn't necessarily have to be tied into each other. I don't know if it's the Beatles or who started that trend.

Pitchfork: So you definitely consider yourself a performer and musician and singer long before a songwriter?

FF: I wouldn't consider myself a songwriter at all. Maybe I piece together a certain little thing here and there, but songwriters are people who do this with sheet music. That's a songwriter-- a guy who sits there and that's what he does, he writes songs. Stephen Foster and all those guys were songwriters. I'm just a guy that sings songs because that's what he likes to do, I guess.

Pitchfork: The performing songwriter sometimes seems like a compromise-- instead of writing the song as best as you can, you have to write it so that you can perform it the best you can.

FF: I guess so, and to each his own. Some people are good cooks and some people are good... I don't see why you have to do all of that. Some guy is good at putting these verses together, and some guy is good at singing them. That's just the way it is. My big thing about it, too, is this whole notion of art or art-music-- that assumption, at this point, that a musician is an artist. I really don't prescribe to that at all. I don't think music is an art any more than cooking food is an art. There's this food that's evolved over thousands of years and people have made their own kind of thing, but it's not art-food, yet.It can be, but it's just food. It's the thing that people do because they have to, because they need it. I feel music is one of those things, too.

Pitchfork: Tell me more about art-music versus music.

FF: There is art-music, and I think that's where there's that big misconception. The history of music is nothing more than the history of art-music or classical music, the music that was commissioned by aristocrats. Essentially any history we have is just a history of aristocrats. We don't have any history of people. We have a history of King Henry VIII and all the wives that he killed and some jerk that's running around trying to claim he owns all this land and kicking and knocking everybody else out of the way. We just have a history of jerks. We don't have any history of people. You have a history of art-music that you equate with music. That's what I love about that term art-music. It separates itself from music-music, the music people have always made.

Pitchfork: When I first heard your record, I liked to consider the possibilities of young folks hearing it and thinking of it with the same ears with which they hear this primitive, low-fidelity music that's a bit of a craze right now. That didn't happen, of course, but do you think there can be a younger generation interested in the music you're making at large?

FF: I think there is a movement toward that, which is interesting. I think it's very spontaneous, and that's why I'm glad about it, that it is a very spontaneous thing. It's not like people are told to do this. It just kind of happened.

I don't know if you've heard of Jerron Paxton-- Blind Boy Paxton. Just the fact that I'd ever meet anybody like him, I didn't think I'd ever meet somebody like that in my life. Sure enough, here's this young black guy that knows the old stuff, and what he does, I don't know that there's anybody that can do it better. I've met some other young guys. I think there's this spontaneous happening toward unindustrialized music, uncorporatized music, just music that happens. There's some young guys here in Los Angeles that play beautiful Balkan music with horns and trombones and trumpets. And they're all like 20 years old-- 20, 22, 23, 24. It's beautiful to see young people playing real instruments and playing real music. It's just beautiful to see.

I think the fact that this stuff is just getting reissued a lot more and is a lot more accessible, now people are starting to be able to look back and say, "Oh my goodness, what have we done? Why aren't we still doing this?" I don't really believe in progress. I think progress is an illusion. I don't think anything can move any further up or down than it already is. All you're doing is twisting things around. There are a few people that are coming back to what I consider to be this human song, or people's music. Just like a bird has a song, man has its song, and it's the most natural thing in the world. Young people are starting to appreciate that.

Pitchfork: You said "playing real music." How does one play fake music?

FF: Yeah, that's a real arrogant thing to say, isn't it? Because I have something to say doesn't mean everyone has to take it too seriously or get too upset that it rubs them the wrong way. Real music is what I consider to be uncorporatized music, the music that just happens. I feel like that's not a very well-known thing today. What we have today is a product. It's the difference between people's food and fast food, McDonald's. We have corporate food. That's not something the people chose. No race or civilization of people are just going to say, "Oh, instead of using real meat, let's just mash up a bunch of lymph nodes and put a bunch of weird stuff in it and pack it up in plastic cans and plastic bins, and let's eat that way. That'll be great." People don't choose that. Corporations choose that, people who want to cut corners to make a profit. They'll throw a bunch of toys attached to it and make it shiny and attractive to the kids and adolescents, just like music. That's the difference. I feel like there's the people's music, and there's corporate music.

I love popular music. I think all of this is popular music. The banjo was one of the most popular instruments in the country for quite a long time. I play popular songs. This is not some obscure, unusual music. This is popular music. And I feel like we don't have popular music today. We have corporate music.